On this day in 1959

Jan. 16, 1959

Credit: Wikipedia

The Minneapolis Lakers met the Cincinnati Royals in an NBA game before a crowd in Charleston, West Virginia. Local fans were eager to see their hometown basketball hero, “Hot Rod” Hundley, play alongside rookie phenom Elgin Baylor, but Baylor sat out to protest racism he and other Black players had experienced the night before. 

“The first thing I said was I was really hurt by that,” he recalled. “I thought about it and I said, ‘I’m not going out there. We’re not like animals in the circus or something and then go out there and put a show on for them.’” 

After arriving in Charleston, a local hotel had denied rooms to him and the two other Black players, Boo Ellis and Ed Fleming. Hundley exploded, telling a hotel official, “You listen to me! You know who this is? Now find us some rooms! All of us!” The official refused, and the Lakers relocated elsewhere. 

The indignities didn’t end there. When the team tried to eat at a local restaurant, they refused to serve the Black players, too. Upset by Baylor’s absence at the game, a local promoter urged Maurice Podoloff, the president of the NBA, to discipline Baylor, calling the player’s absence from the lineup “most embarrassing to us.” 

The NBA president responded, “I would find it hard to punish a man for trying to protect his self-respect and dignity.’’ 

Baylor became one of the best basketball players of all time, a talented NBA executive and an ambassador for the sport. But it wouldn’t be his last encounter with racism. That came when he worked with Donald Sterling, then team owner of the LA Clippers. 

After audio tapes revealed his racism, Sterling was banned from the league. Three years before Baylor’s death in 2021, the Lakers unveiled a statue of him outside the arena, and he published a book about his life in basketball called “Hang Time.”

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